Looking back on another top-notch Cincinnati theater season

If you want to know the “best” shows in New
York City, you need only check which Broadway productions are nominated
annually for Tony Awards. In fact, the Big Apple has tons of awards to
recognize and honor theatrical work. Not so in Cincinnati. From 1997 to
2010, CityBeat nominated and celebrated locally produced theater
with the Cincinnati Entertainment Awards (CEA), and from 2006 to 2011,
the Acclaim Awards, supported by The Cincinnati Enquirer, also
offered recognition. The financial difficulties affecting most
newspapers caused these programs to wither and, despite efforts by
volunteers from the League of Cincinnati Theatres (LCT) to keep them
going, there’s been precious little consistent assessment of excellence
on local stages for more than a year.

LCT evaluated shows during 2011-2012, but publicity for their citations was erratic. CityBeat offered periodic reports on its arts blog; the Enquirer
pretty much ignored the effort. An awards event in May was modestly
attended. Unfortunately, some good shows were ignored, while others of
lesser quality were praised. LCT plans to try again for 2012-2013
although organizational challenges have not been resolved. The awards
are well-intended, but like the proverbial tree falling in the forest,
if no one hears about them, does it really matter?

I do my best to help CityBeat
readers make informed choices about investing their entertainment
dollars. When I see a show worth attending, I award it a “Critic’s
Pick,” a designation you can find in print and online. Most productions
have aspects worth praising, to be sure; no theater company sets out to
do a poor job of putting on a show. But some succeed more fully — and
predictably — than others.

In 2011, I offered a mid-summer
retrospective that singled out worthy productions that should have been
nominated if there was still a coherent awards program. I decided to
repeat the effort this year. I hope that my thoughts might help you
decide if there’s a theater you should subscribe to or follow more
closely.

You really can’t go wrong with the
Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, one of America’s best regional
theaters. The 2011-2012 season was the 20th and final one guided by
Producing Artistic Director Ed Stern. He had an uncanny ability to
select 10 shows — five for the Marx mainstage and five for the smaller
Shelterhouse — that audiences would appreciate. Produced using
nationally respected directors, actors and designers at the top of their
professions, Playhouse shows are always worth seeing. This year Stern
selected shows he personally loved and that he felt certain audiences
would appreciate. He brought back Thunder Knocking on the Door,
Keith Glover’s musical about a mythical guitar-cutting contest between
Blues musicians. It was the top show of 1998-1999 (winning that year’s
CEA as the season’s outstanding production), and it was good to see it
again, although it seemed less vibrant this time around.

Stern brought back director John Doyle, whose 2006 revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Company transferred to Broadway where it won a Tony Award. This time Doyle took on a lesser-known Sondheim show, Merrily We Roll Along,
and produced it with Broadway talent, using an imaginative scenic
design and applying his signature filter, actors who played musical
instruments. The story of failed friendships and artistic ambition
didn’t do as well as Company (a brief revival of Merrily in
New York just before the Playhouse’s March production overshadowed it),
but in my book it was the most interesting production on the
Playhouse’s mainstage.

However, the best overall Playhouse
production, one that will stick with me for many years, was co-directed
by Stern and Associate Artistic Director Michael Evan Haney:
Shakespeare’s As You Like It. It featured 17 actors who had
performed here over the past two decades, and it was imaginatively
presented on the Shelterhouse’s intimate stage. Wonderfully designed by
veteran Joe Tilford, with quirky comic performances and clearly
conceived story telling, the production distilled the play’s warmth and
good will better than any production I’ve ever seen. It was a fine
farewell from a director who will be missed. (In fact, he returns to
stage a show at Ensemble Theatre this fall.)

Speaking of the theater we commonly call
“ETC,” this season it tweaked its name from Ensemble Theater “of”
Cincinnati to Ensemble Theater Cincinnati. There was, however, no change
in ETC’s steady stream of excellent productions. The six shows the
theater presents annually are mostly new to local audiences; ETC
characterizes itself as a “premiere theater.” It’s become a favored spot
where playwrights receive subsequent productions of shows that have had
noteworthy early outings elsewhere. When I’m asked which local theater
is a must-subscribe choice, my answer is usually ETC where D. Lynn
Meyers’ play selection is intriguing (many patrons re-subscribe even
before Meyers announces the shows she plans to produce), and the
execution is predictably good.

The Over-the-Rhine theater, now finding
itself in the midst of urban revival, staged a coup this year with its
season-opener, the 2010 Tony Award-winner next to normal, a Rock
musical about a schizophrenic woman whose affliction affects her entire
family.

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Set to a rip-roaring score, this show was a big challenge for
the theater, and Meyers made it one of the season’s best. In fact, its
strong box office last September caused ETC to bring the show back for
two more weeks in June. All but one member of cast returned. Jessica
Hendy, a CCM product with significant Broadway experience, built on her
powerhouse performance as the disturbed mom. She anchored the moving
show with a solid cast behind her firing on all cylinders. It gets my
vote for the season’s best musical.

But ETC didn’t stop there. It produced Matthew Lopez’s recent play, The Whipping Man,
a fascinating drama set in 1865 at the end of the Civil War and at the
moment of Passover and Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Slaves raised as
Jews celebrate the religious event with the son of the family who owned
them, noting parallels about slavery past and present. Meyers directed
this one, too, and brought out moving performances from a cast led by
local actor Ken Early, who has never been better. Meyers hit a trifecta
with her production of Donald Margulies’ Time Stands Still, a moving drama about recovering from war and personal trauma. Her excellent cast made this story powerful and immediate.

Ensemble Theatre benefits from the
longstanding work of scenic and lighting designer Brian c. Mehring. ETC
is an unusual physical space for theatrical design: The steeply raked
seating means that most audience members are above the acting space,
looking down on the stage. But Mehring meets the challenge show after
show with ingenious creativity, seldom repeating his concepts. His
designs in past seasons were routinely nominated for CEAs. For next to normal his
stylized house, outlined in fluorescent blue tubes and hot incandescent
bulbs, facilitated switches between Diana’s manic states; the decrepit,
demolished Richmond, Va., mansion he created for The Whipping Man oozed the deterioration of the South and the uncertainty that the future held for the characters.

Cincinnati is lucky to have a theater
company dedicated to producing classic work. The quality of what’s
onstage at Cincinnati Shakespeare Company (CSC) has many followers who
enjoy seeing multiple productions across a season utilizing the same
actors in various roles. CSC does a fine job with each production, but
for the second year I felt that their staging of non-Shakespearean plays
excelled their work in their expected repertoire. CSC opened with a
solid staging of Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons featuring
veteran actor Bruce Cromer as Sir Thomas More, at odds with King Henry
VIII over issues of morality, faith and belief. CSC had great success
with another Jane Austen adaptation by Jon Jory, Sense and Sensibility, full of wit and sentiment. (During the 2010-2011 season, Jory’s rendition of Pride and Prejudice was a runaway hit.)

But the show that demonstrated the
strength and depth of the acting company was Frank Galati’s theatrical
adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, directed by
Artistic Director Brian Phillips. Using actors from the ensemble with
musical and vocal skills, Phillips’ production evoked Depression-era
America with believable texture and emotional impact. Led by Justin
McCombs as earnest Tom Joad, CSC founder and veteran actor Nick Rose as
folksy Jim Casy and past CEA winner Sherman Fracher as steadfast Ma
Joad, the cast personified a generation of Americans fading from memory,
although their stories remain pertinent today in a world of economic
collapse and paranoia about people different from the rest of us.

Know Theater of Cincinnati gets my
regular vote of thanks for its annual shot of creativity, the Cincinnati
Fringe Festival. For the eighth consecutive year, we were treated to
two weeks of oddball, offbeat performances that routinely expand the
horizons of what theater can be.

While none of Know’s season productions
was an unqualified hit, two were worthy of note. Inspired by a disaster
in Minnesota when a highway bridge failed, Allison Moore’s Collapse
used the event as a metaphor for personal lives collapsing and people
struggling to recover. Actress Annie Fitzpatrick, a regular on several
local stages, made her Know debut as Hannah, a woman on the brink. She
played the role with assurance and accuracy; her voice and facial
expressions conveyed her profound frustration. Brian Phillips, CSC’s
artistic director, believably portrayed her damaged-goods husband,
trying to rebuild his fractured life.

The closest thing to a 2012 hit for Know was its springtime production of the Rock musical inspired by our seventh president, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.
CCM grad Kellen York didn’t really have the voice to sing the role, but
he looked the part of the charismatic “man of the people”
(characterized as a Rock star in this raucous show), and he was
surrounded by a cast of energetic singers who put the pop in “Populism,
Yeah Yeah.” This is the kind of show that Know excels at staging.

Cincinnati Landmark Productions, operator
of the Showboat Majestic and the Covedale Center for the Performing
Arts, more predictably produces high-quality shows. Holiday productions
tend to be mere money-generators for most theaters, but Covedale’s
December staging of White Christmas, based on the 1954 movie
starring Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney, was beautifully produced and
an artistic and box-office success — fine singing, excellent
choreography and just the right touch for multiple generations to enjoy.
I don’t usually think of holiday shows as likely candidates for awards,
but White Christmas was worthy.

Another local producer coming into its
own is the Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center in Covington,
which often creates shows by partnering with other organizations with
positive results. Last fall it offered the area premiere of Sarah Ruhl’s
award-winning script In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play with
CCM’s drama program, directed by Ed Cohen, a respected local director
who came up through the community theater ranks and now works more
frequently with university programs. This spring, the Carnegie
collaborated with the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra for a satisfying
concert presentation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I. However, my choice for the Carnegie’s best show of 2011-2012 was its own production of the down-home Pump Boys and Dinettes,
a stage full of singers and musicians portraying folks who are just
having a good ol’ time. Jared Doren directed it; Steve Goers provided
music direction (and turned in a fine onstage performance personally)
with able assistance from Brad Myers, lead guitarist with Ray’s Music
Exchange.

The University of Cincinnati’s
College-Conservatory of Music can always be counted on for memorable
performances. The drama program’s chair, Richard Hess, staged a
monumental production of Helen Edmundson’s sweeping historical play, Coram Boy,
requiring a large cast and a big perspective. The musical theater
program offered two beautiful mainstage productions: In the fall,
director and choreographer Diane Lala assembled an excellent rendition
of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! with several outstanding
student performances, especially John Riddle as Curly. But the
production that had everyone talking was Sondheim’s Into the Woods,
gloriously staged by Aubrey Berg, who previously directed the work 20
years ago just after his arrival to chair the musical theater program.
Reba Senske created spectacular costumes for the big-cast show full of
fairytale characters intersecting with one another, and the ensemble
portrayed every role with humor and polish. Senior Katie Johannigman
played Cinderella as a spunky klutz, and Lawson Young, a freshman,
showed lots of promise as a mouthy Little Red Riding Hood.

Northern Kentucky University’s theater program staged an ambitious production of Alice Childress’s seldom-produced Trouble in Mind,
a prickly 1955 script about race relations and the theater. It was
naturalistically assembled by faculty member Mark Hardy, who’s departing
for a new teaching appointment at Montclair State University in New
Jersey. He’s been a valuable contributor to the growing program at NKU. I
missed seeing Ken Jones’s production of the musical My Favorite Year, but I heard good things about it.

Several smaller companies did work worthy
of note, including the new Clifton Performance Theater with the local
premiere of Tracy Letts’ Superior Donuts. Queen City Theater presented an imported version of Samm-Art Williams’ 1980 Tony-nominated Home with three Chicago actors and a one-woman piece, Jessica Dickey’s The Amish Project.
However, since that late-summer burst of activity the on-again,
off-again QCT has been silent. New Edgecliff Theatre, performing in the
Columbia Performance Center in the East End, presented Neal LaBute’s Reasons to be Pretty;
the misogynistic writer is not one of my favorites, but NET’s
production featured several strong performances, especially a thoroughly
dislikable boor played by Justin Baldwin.

If I had my own Hall of Fame, my nominee
for 2011-2012 would be local professional Bruce Cromer. A theater
professor at Wright State University, he finds time to perform on many
Cincinnati stages. Audiences know him best as Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol
at the Cincinnati Playhouse, a role he assumed in 2005 after a long run
as Bob Cratchit. This year he demonstrated tremendous versatility. He
was CSC’s earnest and upright Sir Thomas More. He played several
characters in the Playhouse’s production of the complicated Speaking in Tongues (one of the roles was an obsessive and menacing stalker) and then a likable editor and friend to the central character in Time Stands Still at ETC. As if that weren’t enough, he stepped in to play Dan, the beleaguered husband in ETC’s revival of next to normal,
replacing Mark Hardy, who was not available. We don’t really have to
look to New York for talent when we have performers like Cromer in our
midst. They make for award-winning seasons.